Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

April 16, 2018

“Well, Paul Ryan, you’re a free man now,” began the New York Times editorial that appeared on April 11, the day the Wisconsin congressman announced he’d be stepping down as House speaker and leaving Congress in January. Three paragraphs down, the editorial counseled Ryan about how to put his liberation to good use:

You don’t have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You don’t have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.

To truckle before stands out in that paragraph. Its meaning is clear enough in context – something about deference, obsequiousness, sycophancy – but where does it come from?

July 20, 2017

Until the 1990s, if you lived in the U.S. and needed a new mattress you probably began and ended your search with the letter S. Simmons (founded in 1870), Sealy (1881), and Serta (1931) were the CBS, NBC, and ABC of the mattress world: anything else was on the far end of the dial and virtually unsupported by advertising.*

The Big Three had sturdy, uncomplicated names. Simmons was named for company founder Zalmon Simmons. Sealy took its name from its place of origin: Sealy, Texas. Serta, which began life as the nearly generic Sleeper, Inc., is harder to analyze: I’ve found no etymology for the name, although it may have been an attempt to convey “certain.” (Compare Certs, a brand of breath mints** that debuted in 1956.) Serta and Simmons merged in 2012 to form Serta Simmons Holdings.

Everything began to change in 1992, when Tempur-Pedic – originally a Swedish company called Fagerdala Foams – introduced its “memory foam” (technically viscoelastic; the visco comes from viscosity) mattresses to the U.S. Tempur-Pedic doesn’t tell a story about its name, so I’ll have to guess that it’s an altered-spelling blend of temperature, pure, and orthopedic. (The mattress material is said to respond to body temperature.) As a name, it’s an improvement, to Anglophone ears, on “Fagerdala,” which may have been an anagram of the founders’ names. Tempur-Pedic was acquired by Sealy in 2012 and is now called TempurSealy.

After Tempur-Pedic, the deluge. Foam mattresses were cheaper than traditional innerspring mattresses, and they didn’t require separate box springs. As foam technology improved, more and more companies got in on the sleepy-time action. The advent of the Internet and direct-to-consumer sales encouraged even more competition. The final disruptive turning point was the development of technology that could compress a foam mattress down to a single inch of thickness so it could be packed in a box. Today, U.S. mattress sales total more than $14 billion (the figure is from 2014), and there are dozens of mattress manufacturers – see the Sleepopolis website for reviews and comparisons – whose names reflect a wide range of naming styles. Here’s my rundown of some of the most interesting names. So as not to drive myself nuts, I’m limiting the list to nationally or internationally available brands, which means I’ve left out a bunch of Bay Area names like Ergo, Essentia, and Earthsake. Founding dates are from Crunchbase, Wikipedia, and news reports.

October 31, 2013

The Days of the Dead come to their inevitable end (boo!) with a quick survey of deathly branding.

The floor display for Sinful Colors’ “To Die For” Halloween collection, at Walgreen’s, features a disembodied hand that appears to be on the verge of reanimation. The polish-color names themselves don’t quite measure up, deathworthiness-wise, unless there’s something I’m missing in Unicorn, My Turn, and Over It. Of course, if you think about it long enough, you start to see morbid overtones in all of those names.

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Is that ominous-sounding, be-umlautted word an IKEA product or a death metal band name? Take the IKEA or Death quiz and test your powers of discrimination (or obsession).

The quiz was created by Pittsburgh ad agency Gatesman+Dave. Not only did I do pretty well (15 out of 20), but I also learned that there is a sub-genre of death metal called Pure Depressive Black Funeral Doom Metal. Unless that guy made it up.

Ever wonder why video-game characters die the way the do? It all started in 1983, Drew Mackie writes in “Three-Dimensional Death in a Two-Dimensional World,” when Nintendo’s Mario Bros. made its debut. In the game, Drew writes, Mario “leapt to his death, more or less. It’s weird when you think about what you’re actually seeing: In a game where Mario spent the whole time either facing left or right and scurrying along a two-dimensional plane, he died by facing the screen and jumping off the platform, toward the screen.”

[I]t ended up everywhere in video games from that era — mostly Mario-style platformers, of which there were many, but some other genres too. Your character died, and he or she looked at directly at the screen — at you, effectively — before they spasmed and leapt into oblivion. It’s like they were saying, “Hey. Fuck you. You killed me.” And then the leap. It seems strange, given that it adds a z-axis into a world that often only had an x and a y previously. But that’s how it happened.

Zen names notwithstanding, it looks like Y is the new Z. Last week I wrote about names that substitute Y for I, and I just recently I discovered a new double-Y name, Swayy. It’s a startup that “brings you the best content to easily share with your audience and followers, based on their interests and engagement.” Is the name meant to be pronounced with a plaintive ayy? Or is it just another case of “We rejiggered the spelling to get a cheap domain”?

There’s an asterisk after “We produce the engaging content your brand deserves”; the clarifying footnote reads “Deserves, in a good way.” Yes, “deserve” can flip its meaning—“Shame on you; you had it coming” or “You’re a winner!”—as I noted in my June column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Ads We Deserve.”

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I love a name with a good story and a clever double meaning, which is why I’m so pleased by Rich Brilliant Willing, “America’s premier contemporary lighting and furniture design manufacturer.” The company was founded in 2007 by three RISD graduates whose surnames are—pay attention now—Richardson, Brill, and Williams.

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Another name that pleased me: she++, “a Stanford-based community for innovative women in technology.” The name is a pun on the programming language C++. I love the logo, too.

Read more about “plus” in branding in my April column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”

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Finally, here’s your bad name of the week: Twibfy, a dopey and nearly unpronounceable name for a company that calls itself “an inspirational platform.” (Translation: Pinterest wannabe.) You won’t find the name story on the Twibfy website, but on Twitter a company spokesperson said it’s an acronym (!) for “The World Is Beautiful From us to You.” (Random capitalization and awkward syntax sic). When you search for “Twibfy,” Google asks whether you mean “Twiggy.” That spells twouble. (Hat tip: Catchword.)

October 23, 2012

It’s a fairly safe bet that no one’s drinking game for last night’s presidential debate included “horses and bayonets.” Yet that phrase, with its antique echoes of the Charge of the Light Brigade, was the evening’s surprise zinger, inspiring hundreds of tweets and an instant Horses and Bayonets Tumblr.

The line was President Obama’s, part of his response to Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s familiar charge that the US Navy has fewer ships than it did in 1916:

Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships. It's — it's what are our capabilities.

By amazing coincidence, I’d been preparing my own bayonet zinger, and I thank the president for giving me such a high-profile introduction to a little naming oddity: the Bayonet Sofa, brought to you by a company called – no joke – Handy Living.

The sofa is available (cheap!) from Amazon and Walmart, where a customer complains that “it’s not super comfortable.” With a name like Bayonet, what did she expect? Ouch!

A bayonet, for the record, is “a steel stabbing weapon fitted to the muzzle of a firearm.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word comes from French baïonnette. That may or may not be because the weapons were made in the French city of Bayonne. Yes, it’s another case of “uncertain origin.”

Equally uncertain: why anyone would want to name a piece of upholstered furniture after a sharp steel weapon. Maybe the folks at Handy Living thought Bayonet just sounded fancy and special, like baronet or coronet. Or maybe they hoped the suggestion of bristling bayonets would inspire shoppers to, you know, charge.

a 9,000-square-foot retail space and gallery slated to open in the Mission in September. The design trove will feature furniture, lighting, fashion, and accessories from over 20 firms, as well as collaborative workshop space for Steven Miller Design Studio, Figure Plant, Hazel.Wood Design Group, and Hart/Wright Architects.

November 03, 2011

An original box for a Barbie Go-Together Furniture Kit, circa 1963, is currently on display at theCalifornia Design, 1930-1965 exhibit at LACMA.*

“Chaise longue & side table with 3-D garden setting and accessories!”

Mattel no longer sells this kit, but even if it did, I doubt the seating element would be called a “chaise longue,” which is the correct term. (It’s French for “long chair.”) eBay sellers don’t accept that spelling: they all call it a chaise “lounge,” and so do many other Americans. (In Britain, apparently, the chaise longue is seen only in museums.) In fact, hewing to the correct pronunciation and spelling is liable to tag you as (a) a stickler, (b) a snob, (c) an interior decorator, or (d) French.

I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

“What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

“Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

“Look again,” urged my father.

“Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

“Well, it’s just ‘long,’” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr: “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at the word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

“Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It’s French,” my father explained.

“Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

For the record, my family also owned a shays lounge with covers that didn't need to come in at night.

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* LACMA is one of more than 60 arts institutions participating in Pacific Standard Time, a fascinating and multifaceted retrospective of Southern California art, architecture, and design from 1945 through 1980. I visited six of the participating museums last weekend: the Huntington, the Norton Simon, the Skirball, the Getty, the Hammer, and LACMA. Pacific Standard Time continues through May 2012.

** Highly recommended. The audiobook, which is read by the author, is especially wonderful: Bryson is as lively a reader as he is a writer.

December 27, 2007

Names and slogans are now “the hardest part of my job,” said Edward M. Tashjian, the vice president for marketing at Century Furniture in Hickory, N.C., who oversees the naming of individual pieces and entire collections. “Literally, every time I do it I want to quit and find a new career.” Coming up with a name for one of the new collections “that’s descriptive and engaging — not to mention hasn’t already been used, isn’t completely banal and meets the approval of the rest of the management team — is a nearly impossible task,” he said. ...

Bernhardt Furniture Company, which in the past has focused on traditional furniture but has lately expanded its repertory, also took several months coming up with the name for a new collection that merges old and new, although its approach was somewhat more adventurous. “We were looking for lifestyle-type names that just kind of sounded young and fresh and updated,” said Heather Eidenmiller, Bernhardt’s director of brand development. “You’ve got to find a name that pulls them in but that would never turn them off,” she added: “A name that can be pronounced, and that doesn’t sound like influenza.” (For a brief moment in 2006, the company considered naming its neo-traditional Wilshire Blvd. line for the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, but “you could just hear people say ‘Pantages is contagious,’” Ms. Eidenmiller said.)

“Fairgrove” was among the early contenders for the new line, but was nixed because it lacked an edge and sounded “too traditional.” “Brentwood” was another possibility, but failed because “it’s a bit neighborhood-y sounding,” Ms. Eidenmiller said, and because of the association with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. “I was like, no, we’re not ready to go there yet,” she said.

Eventually, Bernhardt decided on “Arlington,” after various areas in and around Chicago, and what she called its good “phonetics and sound.” (Apparently no one in the group worried about the national cemetery.)

By contrast, contract-furniture makers, which outfit workplaces, are much bolder in their naming strategies than the home-furniture industry. Herman Miller, famous for its Aeron chair, also makes products with evocative names like Ambi and Caper and offers accessories in The Be Collection. Steelcase, a client of mine, has product lines called Topo, Detour, and Relevant. (I named a Steelcase chair Amia.)

Meanwhile, home furnishings are marketed with utterly undistinctive names like Regent, Grayson, and Kingston. By the way, "Arlington" isn't exclusive to Bernhardt: American Leather uses it, too.

December 14, 2007

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could:

BESTAHEDDABJARNUMLERBERGINREDAEKTORPGRUNDTONBERTAKARNA

It turns out, Byrne writes, that the Wikipedians had already cracked the code:

I love discovering a nomenclature's inner structure; it's so satisfying to know that someone has taken the time and care to think creatively about the work that names do.

Still, the IKEA taxonomy is no less enigmatic for having been described. I'm sure there are several PhD theses waiting to be written about it. Music, chemistry, and nautical terms for lighting? Feminine names for curtains, masculine names for chairs and desks? And what subtle intra-Scandinavian tensions or harmonies are revealed by the assignment of Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish words to certain categories but not others? Is there some national stereotype about the Finns (for example) setting an especially attractive table? Or, more perversely, not?

The Wikipedia article continues:

Because IKEA is a world-wide company working in several countries with several different languages, sometimes the Nordic naming leads to problems where the word means something completely different to the product. A well known example was the bed frame GUTVIK. As the word can be pronounced Gootfick it invites German-speaking people to understand it like gut fick which is somewhat close to "good fuck" in German.

Then there's this tidbit:

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.

Take heed, O ye makers of automobiles and techno gizmos!

The name IKEA, by the way, is an acronym. IK stands for Ingvar Kamprad; the E stands for Elmtaryd, the farm where Kamprad grew up, and the A is for Agunnaryd, Kamprad's home village.